


litany

by samarqand



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst and Porn, Codependency, Existential Angst, Hair Washing, M/M, Masturbation, Rimming, Sibling Incest, War of Wrath, Writing on the Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:28:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27900781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: A collection of ten things Maglor loses through the course of one autumn as the War of Wrath commences.
Relationships: Maedhros | Maitimo/Maglor | Makalaurë
Comments: 27
Kudos: 52





	litany

**Author's Note:**

> 中文翻译 / Chinese translation [available here](https://lomaksarne.com/2020/12/19/litany/).
> 
> I wanted to explore the steady apocalypse (and this very specific point in Maglor&Maedhros' relationship) that was the War of Wrath: the monotony, loneliness, and intensity of having to bear witness to the crumbling of the known world.
> 
> But in the end, all I wrote was a "[character] is sad and gets railed" fic. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!

1.

It is over, but it doesn’t end. 

Every day, the sun still groans into the pale sky and the wind still snaps against the tent’s canvas on its way out to sea.

With autumn arrives the first earthquakes in Beleriand: soft jingles that launch into wastings of cliffside and fen. The smoke of warfare mutes the daylight now, stalling in choked columns upon the hills.

And the seawater, spilling across the lowlands toward higher ground, learns to conquer and then never stops.

+

Every dawn, Maedhros gathers firewood, his eyes toward the roaring coastline just beyond their campsite. He watches, crouched in the rushes and brambles, the boats from the West bearing the host of the Valar.

They bellow their horns and their gloaming phalanxes drum the earth in their march. Their ranks orient northward, whirling with refugees, courageous Edain, and Fëanorian defectors. Faces Maedhros and Maglor once knew.

Maedhros resolves to find a path to the other side of the war, where awaits his and Maglor’s victory -- where he finally discovers what victory looks like.

At dawn, he touches at Maglor’s hair briefly as an accident before disappearing into the tapestry of trees. 

He’s away for hours or nights at a time on patrol. Emerging from the gaining green-dark, following the sound of Maglor’s singing back to camp, he often returns bearing a thin squirrel or stoat. He makes an formidable predator of the forest.

The predator crouches down next to Maglor to stoke the little fire as they cook – their only meal of the day, if Maedhros had his way. Maglor insists on tea and dried whinberries in the evenings, reassuring Maedhros they'll take only as long as it shall to reaffix the veil of civility to themselves.

“We are no beasts yet,” Maglor reminds him, refusing to be gainsaid as he slips a cup of stringent birch tea into his brother’s hand.

He knows, someplace liminal and stifling inside him, it might be untrue. He knows how violently he has striven to be a gentle thing. He also knows wanting to be good to Maedhros -- wanting to be good -- is the only thing he seeks for himself now.

Every night, Maglor looks to the brightest star in the heavens: westerly, shining sharp enough to cut. 

He tips his face up to let its glow lash at his unmarked skin. He is made plain under its light: no fair Firstborn, no devout Oath-keeper, no silvery songbird. He is a small smudge on the land, drowned in the dark of his own making.

“Please,” he prays. He doesn't sing hymns anymore. He doesn't supplicate it with a serenade. “Please, let us go.”

+

Maedhros refuses to be still. He distrusts calm and rests little, venturing long into the hinterlands for something beyond sight. 

Sometimes he teases Maglor, a dry remark, to earn a little push or a smile. Sometimes they go days without speaking. Maglor keeps singing anyway, improvising melodies upon his harp to the tempo of his brother’s stride.

When the strings mellow their final note (buzzing undertone, imperfect; they beg yet another tuning in the clammy weather), he endures their gloomy guerrilla wanderings by curling himself over songwriting. He wrestles with euphony: _fastness_ or _fortress_.

\-- He never writes in past tense anymore. In past tense, compositions become lists: a catalog of everything vanished. To sing in past tense is to dredge the depths of loss and dwell somewhere abyssal, suffocating --

Present tense is Maedhros interrupting his solitary playing, hours in: “No more haunting yourself.”

Maedhros knows, somehow, of the specters he drags along –- how he refuses to let them rest for fear of being left alone.

At the fire, Maglor sounds through the prosody of lyrics he has scrawled on spare parchment. 

“Come here,” Maedhros says, draping an arm over his shoulder.

There must be an arrangement of words to soothe the serrated edges he and Maedhros call _living_ , a pebble rolled smooth across the seabed. Something like absolution from the promise of anguish, if only the right incantation is spoken. 

If only he could be its speaker.

 _Fastness_ or _fortress_.

He neatly folds the scrap of parchment, tucks it into his cloak, and leans himself against Maedhros.

He hums something wordless.

2.

Maglor gave his lute to Elros before they parted ways forever.

Then he unfastened his necklace, a family heirloom, from his neck and gave it to Elrond.

Elros’ lip had quivered as he cradled the instrument; he thickly struggled through declaring that he would care for it as well as Maglor had.

Elrond had grappled Maglor into a wordless embrace, strong so that Maglor could not worry for either of them. He pet intently at Maglor’s hair like he would console him for this and every coming bereavement. 

Seeming to know.

“Should you face a time of need,” Maglor suggested, “you might barter these for -– “

“No, no,” Elrond and Elros hushed, cradling their gifts.

And then they were gone.

Maglor had played his harp to the tune of their absence until his calluses tore and his fingers bled, fearfully waiting on the notes to pick up and flee from him. Because he was irredeemable again, and there was nothing left within the ruin he had wrought.

But hours in, there was Maedhros. Maedhros had taken his hand, startling him from the sympathetic strings. No more haunting yourself. “We have work to do, Makalaurë.”

And though it was over, it didn’t end. 

Maedhros had kissed his stung fingers and watched Maglor bandage them. 

And Maglor had slipped with preternatural ease back into the rhythm he and Maedhros kept together for so long, just the two of them: they paced onward, and he had foraged beechnuts that cracked open after first frost, and then toward dawn he had sprawled beside Maedhros on the cold roots and leaves to join him in drowsily naming every raucous nightbird and gruffing beast they heard speaking, unseen, in the forest.

It didn’t end: not while Maedhros kept moving in his compulsive conviction; not while Maglor still loved him.

+

The Fëanorian forces, brittled away to a skeleton, focus on reconnaissance now. Wiping the grit of travel from his brow, a scout confers with Maedhros and Maglor on the host of the Valar’s procession northward. Before disappearing back into the wilds, he mentions that some leagues inland, near a smattering of fairy rings, a few families of mortal Men have built homesteads to wait out the war.

Maglor rummages through his satchel. Every leaf of paper and vellum is creased; every scarf demands darning with long-lost sewing needles.

He collects a small illustrated herbarium, parchment foxed but still pleasing to the eye, and wanders into the unruly trees.

Drifting through the course of the afternoon toward the sound of Men’s loud living, he finds a small mortal boy and his older sister outside a dwelling. In their muted robes, they seem akin to the house sparrows hopping across the thatched roof.

Their business screeches to a halt and they stare at him, stunned -– before awed smiles soften their faces. They wipe their soil-smeared hands; they have been foraging. Maglor assesses his own insensitivity for intruding only to offer parchment.

He introduces himself by his mother-name only and asks if they can read Sindarin. The girl nods; the little boy speaks up: he’s learning, he proclaims. 

Briefly, Maglor presents them the herbarium, its tables of prescriptions and charming illustrations. “It describes some uses for Beleriand’s southerly plants,” he explains. “Perhaps your family may find it a welcome companion.”

Their attention flits from the parchment to his face. They don’t look into his eyes, but at his eyes, astounded by the Light in them. 

“Upon this page are plants cultivated for their medicinal virtues. And here, the plants fit for culinary use. Do you see?”

“Yes. Yes, thank you very much,” the girl says. She bows, then curtsies. She handles the parchment gingerly until the boy grabs at it for himself. She peers at the limned illustrations of juniper and oxeye, brushing a hand through the boy’s hair. Her ruddy face glows with excitement: a lover of beauty, she hungers for its vestiges in this hostile world.

Moved, Maglor slips his gold bracelet from his wrist with a decided tug.

“And please, take this, too,” he encourages, ad hoc and feeling inelegant for the improvisation; would mortal Men imagine he’d once been a performer who suffused grace into the grimmest tidings, ruling art into word and deed -- he’d once been a bard worthy of this adornment, would they believe it -- . “It is yours.”

The girl shakes her head frantically, but her hands are already open to receive the bracelet. “Oh,” she says, shaking her head again as she clutches the shining gold, “thank you. Thank you.”

Maglor bestows a bright smile upon them and disappears into the trees.

He cannot disappear from Maedhros, whose eyes find him later in the violet dusk when he returns.

Maedhros marks a bouquet of wildflowers in Maglor’s hand and follows it to Maglor’s naked wrist. His granitic face is unreadable.

“I felt a tremor in the earth earlier,” Maglor announces by way of greeting. “Though soft to my soles, it rustled the starlings free from the tree crowns. Look -- their murmurations have not ceased since.” He points his bouquet southward, where a black, many-winged cloud curves and swivels in the sky. “How I’d love to set words to their esoteric shapes.”

Inside their tent: “You insist on poetry,” Maedhros remarks.

Maglor reaches up and caresses the austere angle of Maedhros’ jaw.

Maedhros’ hand closes around his unadorned wrist in reply, gentle.

“While the choice is still mine to make,” Maglor replies. He reaches for a punctured waterskin to prop up and fill with his hand-picked flowers. “And for as long as we two remain.” 

He places the makeshift vase of blossoms near their dented wash basin, and regards this introduction of beauty to their shelter. “I would.”

The monster is not only jaws. It has a heart, too.

3.

Stillness is a prison. Maedhros would rather die than return.

But the creatures they once hunted along the coast have begun seeking refuge toward Beleriand’s interior, away from the floods and quakes overlooked by the smoldering sky; perched together on an alder tree bough, vantage point shrouded by leaves and rainfall, Maedhros' bearing has gone harpstring-taut with the inertia of their activity.

“Sing.”

Maglor glances to Maedhros at the sound of his voice. He keeps his syllables simple: one, two, uttered only just above the spitting rain. “Shall I?”

Maedhros nods, keeping his hard gaze ahead, filing down the landscape. 

Singing has worked before; rabbits, now gone, were once easy to entrance with nursery rhymes. Just two verses of a gentle-textured lullaby, and the quail would begin marching out of the brush –- _Keeping perfect time_ , Celegorm laughed once as he watched, before he launched himself forward to catch one and broke the spell.

Maglor had learned early on, back in their homeland sundered from them, how to entice one or two intrepid deer out of hiding: sing tenderly, and the deer would perhaps circle him, keen to listen. Their cautious orbit would close in until Maglor could, languorously as one lost in thought, sing through bending his bow, sing while sending the arrow winging to the kill, sing his prey to sleep. Never missing a beat.

He tries to avoid wielding song as a weapon -- he remembers the way Maedhros and their father looked at him when they witnessed him sing a stag out to meet its demise: Fëanor had folded his arms in utmost pride; Maedhros had lowered his own bow to look him up and down. Enthralled, but -- disquieted.

That lithe, chasing gaze upon him -- Maglor wanted to ask Maedhros, _How do you look at me?_

“Requests?” Maglor asks.

“New song,” mutters Maedhros, defying nostalgia.

Maglor debuts an inchoate lay he’s been composing, a serene melody, to an audience of one against the storm’s glower. A soggy songbird.

Maedhros leans close, a subtle cold-to-warm Maglor drifts into. Maedhros brushes away a raindrop coursing down his cheek as he sings. His hand lingers -- his hand tugs Maglor’s hood over his head. He glances over to his brother, finds him rapt. A hint of a smile dimples Maglor’s cheeks, lips curving around the words he sings. _The full moon shall empty itself for nights upon me_ \-- 

Half the arrows’ shafts have splintered by now; the feather fletching clumps into unbalance. Maglor fans the feathers out methodically with his fingertips as he sings, his song a lure dipping and sinking into the shadows. 

And then his eyes find Maedhros’ again.

No movement but their own; no eyes in the entirety of Arda seeking them, save their own seeking each other.

Until they hear cloven hooves crunch against twigs in slow gait. A thin boar, exceptional to encounter now, approaches their tree.

Singing on, Maglor curls his fingers on the bowstring with an exquisite poise.

The overused arrows fly true yet. He draws, and then the arrowhead releases in a biting arc. It singes the air and sinks into the boar’s neck. Another follows, merciful. 

The boar collapses. The song dwindles. Food for a while longer.

Maedhros grabs Maglor’s shoulder with the final note and kisses him, a bedraggled and relieved press of their lips together. 

He drops from the tree into the open rain, effortlessly shouldering the twitching animal. He slants his smile up to Maglor. A scar on his lower lip stretches white and painful. 

Maedhros never seems to notice.

4.

Boil flaxseed to oil, rose petals to rosewater. 

Polish the harp’s fine cherrywood; coax a starry melody from over-loved strings.

Buff away the blood from leather boots. Fight a losing battle with the stains that remain.

Maglor’s hands keep working lest he lose anything else.

Tonight, a tremor grumbles into a malefic uprising. The earth rattles; Maglor abandons his work to sit on the dirt before he falls. Palms against the earth, he imbibes its unease.

“Again,” Maedhros remarks, eyes bright, galvanized by the earthquakes’ imperative of change.

Alike in kind: Maitimo Nelyafinwë Fëanorion and the land's violent transfiguration.

Unseen in the aftermath, a rockslide eviscerates marshland.

There, the primeval cracking of landscape that drops away like a mask.

+

Near the crumbling cliffside, they find a fissure that the earthquake has cleaved open. It yawns the ground open darker than the sky, and steams blisteringly hot.

Maglor recoils at the sight, his gaze darting northeast after two boys long gone.

“They are safe.” Maedhros’ shoulder bumps against his –- lending him assurance even while Maedhros’ voice remains stolid. “Elrond and Elros are capable, Káno.” He then steals a look into the chasm. “It’s a steep fall,” he gauges. He kicks a pebble into the expanse.

Maglor curls his fingers around Maedhros’ swordbelt. His knuckles dig into the small of his brother’s back, but Maedhros accepts the intrusion. After a thoughtful moment, Maedhros comments, uncommonly conversational: “Tyelko would leap across it.”

“Yes,” Maglor agrees, “he would with nary a thought. Daring and swift enough to pierce a heart.”

Maedhros looks to him for only a beat; then he returns his attention to the chasm. “What do you say I would do?”

“You would join me in returning to our campfire,” he answers in a voice trained sweet under strain. (Under strain.) “You would keep me company over tea before the dawn breaks and daylight asks our attention away.”

And Maedhros weighs this, like he would rather another answer.

Like Maglor’s offer of himself isn’t enough.

What to do with this eventuality? To be not enough, not enough to keep the only person left to you.

To be unable to reach, though you reach out to hold, to insist, to stop –-

“You say so,” Maedhros responds.

“'So,'” Maglor smiles.

Maedhros’ fingers hook around Maglor’s swordbelt, a mirror to the ones at his waist. 

Locking themselves together, they turn their backs on eventuality.

+

Tyelko would leap across it. 

Celegorm’s revenant returns in dreams, vivid as living. 

He balances on the edge of the chasm before vaulting over the void, leaping back and forth, stitching up the earth underfoot. He lands and flicks white-gold hair back; he refuses to gather it out of his eyes. He thinks it makes him look powerful, to go running blind into trouble.

Celegorm swipes Maglor’s harp from his lap and twangs tunelessly on it, dodging Maglor’s reach and protestations. He snickers at Maglor’s frustration but his stare could chill. He leers, _Weak-willed Káno_.

Curufin’s mouth twists into a displeased smile. He is an apparition of their father: alike in clipped step, in the way he dissects Maglor with only a look. He’s seen enough: he juts his chin up to Celegorm in a silent signal, and they depart Maglor and Maedhros’ company to lay their own plans. They never stay for long now. Curufin judges Maglor dispassionately, _You are too tender-hearted_.

Maglor holds to their words like a rope and crawls his way out of the pit of ugliness he has walked himself into. _Intercede for me_ , he entreats his brothers. He clutches at their disdain --

 _Weak will_ over the blood of his own kin freckled across his skin.

 _Tender heart_ over the sigh of flesh and death when Maglor sinks his blade and twists.

He crawls out. Unstrung, blackened, he claws his way out and pretends he had not dug the pit with his own hands.

He’d been hapless. He was pushed.

But in truth, it had been so easy to transform into a creature reviled and alone.

Maglor’s world is small now.

In his world, Maedhros takes his hand. Perhaps Maedhros still loves him. Everything between them gone so bloodsoaked that there is a fear in Maglor, sometimes, of making himself vulnerable in his need for Maedhros’ love –- to be open interminably to Maedhros, offering up his love amid the howling endtimes.

But yesterday. Yesterday Maedhros brought a handful of autumn cyclamens into the tent to join Maglor’s flowers. He had slipped them into the waterskin, and waited for Maglor to notice the newcomers, and to smile, before he left on patrol into the hinterlands.

 _Together_ , they promise, pulling each other from destruction to destruction. 

+

An hour or two of restless repose under a shared rabbit fur blanket, coupled back-to-back. The straw-filled palliasse’s divots and swells declare themselves under their bones.

Maglor blinks away respite when he hears Maedhros shifting. 

The suggestion of rhythmic movement, brief intervals. Maedhros is touching himself. 

An owl calls through the latticework of vines; what remains for a raptor to hunt in this bereft wood, Maglor doesn’t know. He doesn’t know to whom the owl speaks. If he ingratiates himself to it with an ode, perhaps he might learn its secrets to survival.

But Maedhros doesn’t admit to hunger, nor uncertainty. His focus only stabs upon the next turn upon their besieged path; he seeks to race their fate and see it realized. He won’t allow himself the luxury of striving for another life.

If this season’s bitter discourse sweetens with the next, there will be time to devote a poem to Maedhros’ unassailable command of himself. He could sit up now, draw his harp close to seek a tune –

Maedhros’ breathing goes unsteady. 

Maglor buries his face in the blanket, fingers worrying at the rumpled fur. 

Or perhaps he could turn over to his brother and slip his arms around him.

A well-recited gesture. A dangerous gesture.

A devotion honed by lean years and loss into a craving.

_You have me._

Craving for touch, heat, knowing.

Maedhros’ breathing hitches. His movements, staccato, quicken. 

Maglor bites his lip.

A sharp exhale through grit teeth as Maedhros comes. 

The fur pulls as his tempo slows into immense silence. A sigh.

Then gently, Maedhros’ back eases against Maglor’s.

They keep still together, feeling each other breathe.

When the first waking bird sings away the final star, Maedhros sits up, pauses, and then leaves to collect water and build fire.

Maglor rolls over and curls himself against Maedhros’ abandoned warmth.

The sea breeze carries a few motes of ash through the slanting aperture of their tent: a message of ill tidings from the North. Unable to answer the crisis with valor, Maglor draws the fur close over himself. He closes his eyes and considers.

Consider the fur’s texture not as material but a manner of singing, symphonious and rich. The ashes drifting over their camp only a fresh, early snowfall. 

And Maedhros’ warmth a chime resonating throughout Maglor’s body, gaining on him like a flood -- until he’s laid open with the sensation, filled up with it. Humming for more.

His hips move once against the mattress, and then again, asking against the emptiness.

Before the day demands his hands forget all but work, they drift down, touching. He nuzzles into the heat so soon to leave, touching himself until he’s shivering for it. He strokes slowly, distantly aware of the tempo he’s mimicking –- and he recalls the way it quickened just so, and he matches it -– before a fitful noise leaves him and he presses himself against the empty palliasse – desiring, burning against --

Touch just to touch.

Touch for a terrifying need.

Touch to feel he is far away from this place –- swimming out with the tide’s pull to meet Maedhros in open water, breathless and exhilarated. 

He is swimming, panting and helpless to the surge, the rush that gathers him up just before –- .

The wave crests upon them. A gasp. And they are swept under.

They slip away together.

5.

They don’t speak of happiness anymore. They stitch together a patchwork of fleeting comforts to stave off despondence.

Maglor washes Maedhros’ hair while the morning fog still drapes open the trees. Milkvetch, ash, rosewater mixture on the creek’s bank. Knees folded to a kneel on the slippery polished stones behind Maedhros, his hands scrub briskly to subdue the impatient edge in Maedhros’ posture.

Fingers curling against scalp, he declares, “I have tamed you.”

Maedhros tilts his head and creaks an eye open to look back to Maglor. His skin is flushed with cold; he hadn’t cared to wait for a tub of hot water, didn’t plan to indulge. He’d splashed into the creek’s glacial shallows and scrubbed unforgivingly at himself instead. 

The scars licking across his body redden into a private language of pain. Maglor knows the placement of every tally mark of agony by now, learned rote with the years. And yet, he still goes silent for seeing them, sometimes.

“You’ve done what to me?” Maedhros mutters.

“When a wild creature lets you bathe it, no biting or clawing, that is when you know,” Maglor intones, “at last it has taken to you. It is tame.”

“When did I bite you -- .”

“When I pilfered a fig from you in Himring,” Maglor supplies. “One morning as the cold climes eased toward a brief summer.” He douses Maedhros’ hair with frigid water. “You bit my hand in retaliation.”

Maedhros scrunches his face up against the water. “Finno was there, and Moryo.”

Maglor combs his fingers through Maedhros’ hair in answer. Well past his shoulders now, the color of heat slick across his palms -- there and gone.

“And then we went riding together,” Maedhros concludes. He closes his eyes again when Maglor traces his finger along the severe line between his brows. “You and me.”

(And there had stood a fig tree, hadn’t there: a minor miracle in the frozen highlands. And Maglor had hopped into the branches to retrieve a fig and present it to his brother with a flourish. A peace offering, he had blithely explained.

And Maedhros had sliced it open right there while they remained hidden away behind the tree; they had both eaten their halves furtively, sharing secretive smiles as though children yet, sealing a pact –- a fangless and intimate pact, a pact already well-kept.

 _Together_ , they promised.

And then they had guided their horses to the stables, and raced each other around the perimeter of Maedhros’ forboding fortress, boots squeaking upon the flagstone, dark wooden beams blurring past them -– Maglor laughing through a primal, good fear. 

Running forefoot, desperate to get ahead. Desperate to fall behind.

The thrill of being overtaken. The thrill of losing to Maedhros.

How terribly seductive it seemed, to be caught, conquered -- 

But Maglor, fleet-footed, had managed to just outrun Maedhros, and was the first to smack his hand against the gatehouse portcullis with a clang and a victorious “Ha!” 

And he’d archly asked, as Maedhros skidded to a stop before him, “What is my prize?”

And Maedhros had swept him off his feet in an embrace.

All that terrible, white-hot conflagration of power lodged now within Maedhros, only to dote on Maglor. Only to duck his head and pepper Maglor’s face with kisses –- again, and again -- interrupted by Maglor’s gasp of laughter -– and again.

And Maglor was sure then that Maedhros still loved him.

And they had found Fingon and Caranthir inside the hall and spent the evening together with wine and syrupy dates, making plans for optimistic eventualities. Drunk and determined.

They had all sung some frivolous ditty together, Caranthir stomping a percussion against the table before Fingon grabbed him to dance, a clumsy swaying -- and as Maglor sang to the swooning time they kept, a bell’s brilliant peal, he had steeled himself through a strange apprehension. He slid his hand into Maedhros’ under the table.

Had his nails dug into Maedhros’ hand then? Was his insistence on this life, this moment of living, palpable? Holding fast, date-sticky fingers intertwined, their eyes had locked. They had looked at each other. 

And Maedhros was maimed, beset with waking nightmares, hungering insatiably to eliminate all who would eliminate them -- but he was smiling then, smiling at him.

And Maglor was sure then that Maedhros still wanted his love.)

Present tense: Maglor dips his hand in the water, brushes his fingers against Maedhros’ marred cheek. Maedhros tilts his face into his palm. Scar tissue, obstinate, warms reluctantly to his touch.

Present tense: perhaps Maedhros resents having devoted that brilliant afternoon to Maglor alone, when Fingon and Caranthir were waiting just out of sight. He had trusted in time’s interminable march, but then time was gone for Fingon and Caranthir, and they left only their broken, apathetic bodies as memento.

They refuse Maglor’s offerings, rebuke his requiem and dirge. White femur and red gash, their unblinking attention denounces him.

And the pact made with Maedhros is tarnished now with butchery and sacrifice. 

_Together._

And perhaps Maedhros resents making such a ghastly promise to Maglor. There were others, perhaps, whose hands Maedhros would sooner take while running toward ruin. 

_And now, at last, all is lost to you but me._

And does that make Maglor a blessing or a curse to Maedhros?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Maedhros tells him. He pulls away, wringing his hair through his fist and then reaching for his trousers.

“And you do not turn and flee? How dear of you,” Maglor sing-songs, erasing the undertow of trouble on his face.

Maedhros turns his gaze upon him. Prickling, hot against his core.

“Stop thinking it,” Maedhros finishes. 

He redoes his trousers and hands his honed dagger to Maglor.

It’s a brief, well-rehearsed ritual now. Maedhros pulls at his damp hair, stops at the base of his skull as he sits with his back to Maglor on the moss and stone. “Here?” Maglor confirms behind him, hand drifting over Maedhros’ as he twists the first lock neatly in his fingers.

He cuts through Maedhros’ hair effortlessly with the whetted blade. He listens to the susurration of shearing, the sound of relief. 

He doesn’t look down to see his brother’s hair casting about the dark forest floor like gleaming debris.

He was once upon a time grieved of the loss on behalf of Maedhros, a fresh sip of sorrow each time this task was asked of him. Maedhros, catching him by surprise in Himring, would force the dagger’s hilt into his reluctant hands with some exasperated, wry comment at the sight of Maglor’s chagrin. _Do what your elders and betters tell you, Káno._

And Maglor would cut gingerly to the nape of his neck, before lowering the dagger to suggest they were finished.

 _Till I cannot feel it_ , Maedhros would command. 

And when enough was gone, Maedhros would smile at the bereavement.

\-- Things changed after Himring was lost to them. Maglor’s world grew smaller, until Maglor’s world dwindled to nothing but Maedhros. And drawing a smile from Maedhros is now a means of slaking his thirst for Maedhros’ love.

Now, it only takes a few moments of wordless work. Well-practiced though it is, Maglor is glad of its end.

“There,” he concludes. He leans around Maedhros, who sits gleaming there with remote satisfaction -– he coaxes Maedhros to turn to face him with the press of a finger to his jaw. He assesses his handiwork, then brushes a kiss to Maedhros’ cheek.

Maedhros catches sight of himself in the creek’s rippling reflection. He seems surprised, almost, as he reacquaints himself again with his transformation. Nose broken and healed crooked, scarred mouth mirthless, stony brow. Lacerations and amputations –- a body ravaged and reassembled throughout their endless undertaking. 

Then he looks to Maglor, who leans over the water to see what Maedhros sees.

Maedhros watches his brother’s reflection in lieu of watching his own: Maglor still, inexplicably, untouched and radiant to behold.

Their reflections regard one another. 

“How you look at me,” Maedhros says, his voice low.

“How do I look at you?”

The question sinks in the silence: Maedhros is already rising, onward to the next demand. 

Stillness is penance.

6.

They don’t speak of happiness anymore, but Maedhros smiles still. He smiles when he persuades the scattered bands of orcs, who drop their weapons and scramble away at the sight of him, to pass the time with him.

He makes a game of their terror. Flickering through the foliage, he spends hours as a smoke, countenancing their vulnerabilities and weaponry. He coasts through the apathetic trees and crouches in their keep, listening in on their crude conferences until the red of his hair flares in the squalid daylight; it catches an orc’s eye and the orc looks up –

And their throats are gashed open wide, navels split. Maedhros whittles them down to a jumble of useless, suffering limbs. 

He toys just a little with the last orc alive, kicking him down to watch him sneer and struggle at his feet. 

He stares down at the beast. “See me,” he commands. The orc thrashes away. 

Maedhros smiles at the creature’s impudence. Blade arcing like a glissando, he slices off the orc’s ear. The orc screeches bloodily.

“See me,” Maedhros tells the orc. The fire of his will withers the creature into a lost thing that steals a glance up -- and Maedhros runs the orc through with his blade. 

He leans into the act: reveling.

The stench of death clinging to him like a coronation mantle, Maedhros strides unhurried to the yew tree in which Maglor waits. 

Maglor sits farouche in the crook of the tree, eyes downcast; Maedhros chases his attention. When Maglor finally looks at him askance:

“Let’s go,” Maedhros states, simply.

Sprinkled in dark, crusting blood with his head held high, Maedhros looks a figure of legend. A charnel light haloes him, hallowed and hollowed out at once. 

An ember cradled by the kindling it will burn through.

At their camp, Maglor pulls his harp between his legs and plucks out a honeyed melody, replacing cacophony with control.

Maedhros says curtly: “Speak your mind.”

Expecting a fight.

“These strings refuse to hold tune,” Maglor murmurs, control of his tone absolute. “And is the culprit the daily downpours, or is it the very air, dulled with warfare? I cannot say.”

Maedhros towers against the sky, waiting on him.

Maglor tips his head up to him, keeping his wrists neutral upon the instrument. He considers, and then answers primly, “I believe with every choice we make, a choice is lost to us in turn. Thus, for my part, I would seek out saving graces over beastly bloodthirst.”

“I kept those orcs from sniffing out your Mortals’ dwellings as you preened over your virtues from on high,” Maedhros counters, crouching before Maglor. “Beastly, am I?”

Maglor straightens where he sits, holding Maedhros’ impassive stare. “— No more beastly than I. So long we have journeyed hand in hand, you and I are filthied by the same pitch.” 

“There are scores of those orcs to come yet. I would meet them in their _dedication_ ," Maedhros continues on. “If a culling so bruises your sensibilities, we are overlate to journeying northward.”

“Now? Amid war?” Maglor shakes his head, tempered defiance: “You are trying to rattle me.”

“I am giving you options.”

“Should we hasten any closer to the war, we'll endure a wasteland, Nelyo.”

“Yes,” Maedhros agrees flatly. “We meet our new miseries now or we meet them later. But we shall come to know them.”

Maglor’s wrists curve tense. “All the same, we needn’t fling ourselves into every hardship.”

“What do you propose, Káno? Would you like me to go on playing house with you till we forget our undertaking?”

“The Oath will not abide our forgetting,” Maglor snaps, hurt. “But the Oath is patient. As we are wise to be, for now.”

“So you tell yourself,” Maedhros mutters.

Maglor looks past his welling of anger. He looks past Maedhros’ confrontation to his left ear, disfigured by a cropping; the mangling is ragged –- and deliberate. The imperfection is intentional.

And the relic of agony admonishes him. He could lament for his brother, who indulges in no such weaknesses –- only seeks to inflict the same suffering where he may, before the end.

And before Maedhros disappears on patrol, Maglor pulls at Maedhros’ cloak; he pulls him in and kisses him –- his lips, the underside of his jaw. It seems paramount that Maedhros know how dearly he wants to. 

“I love you, Nelyo,” he reminds him.

“But?” Maedhros asks with an insouciant stare down at him.

Maglor blinks down. He retreats, his attention returning to his harp where his disappointment can’t be tracked. He draws forth a song from the sympathetic strings. 

\-- Strings ever out of tune, the sound muddy. 

Tuning key. Caress against the wood shoulder. He doesn’t raise his head to watch Maedhros leave: he loses himself in work to hide from the solitude of loving the one person still to love, and then being left alone.

+

Stillness is confession. Maedhros would sooner seek death than concede their evils may have been for naught. His adaptation to the ravaged wilds could be beautiful, framed within the right succession of notes: a chorus to commemorate Maedhros’ red hair misted with blood.

So goes the progeny of a family of heretics.

None of Fëanor’s sons spared from their own conflagrations –- save for Maedhros, who drank of the flame till he glowed with it. Save for Maglor, who bewitched the flame into flickering out.

They remain as two spectral figures upon the coast, already watchful as the dead. Maybe, like the dead, it’s impossible to be hurt anymore -- save by each other.

I love you

But?

it isn’t enough.

Maglor looks to the West.

The brightest star is waiting, grinning down the land’s tumult. Waiting on him.

How could you, he asks it.

Your gleeful tyranny.

Your horror.

How could you?

7.

Sing to announce existence.

Lamplight for company, Maglor bends to his songwriting, forgoing the desk to scrawl intently against the palliasse. 

Still here, soughs the scratch of quill against margins. Still extant, submerged in the extinct forest.

The reason to persist smiles at him only sometimes. And what is left of their world is here in this tent:

_The harp’s carved column is mnemonic for memory._

__

__

_The rainwater seeping through the canvas is wreckage. This palliasse, an anchor._

_Each string untuned, desire._

_The flowers wilting beside the washbasin are conclusion._

_Maedhros’ longknife is rejoicing._

_The parchment is_ -–

The parchment is gone. 

His last scrap shimmers with charcoal ink, utterly overwritten. He fans the wet ink to dry as he searches about himself for more, perhaps corners of a discarded map or torn missive.

Nothing, nothing. He has finally run out of parchment.

_Your existence, somewhere, my reckoning._

Still netted in the flows of tone and turn of phrase, he slides up his linen tunic’s sleeve and scribbles out his impressions along the inside of his forearm. The ink slinks against his skin, sloppy, but -- it suffices, while he is ensnared by inspiration. 

_Your existence, somewhere_ –- 

He writes.

Maedhros returns. Four nights away.

Maglor looks up from his work, a smile luminous on his face. “At last. What news?”

Maedhros dashes rainwater from his forehead. “None,” he says, shucking off his vambraces, swordbelt, and cloak in a heap. “No news. An abundance of conjecture, however, from scouts with too much time on their hands, it seems –- .” 

He halts to squint, as though his knife-keen sight has ever deceived him, at Maglor’s work. “You are after writing lyrics?” he asks. “On yourself.”

Maglor raises a hand, an iteration of a shrug. “I am deprived of parchment, so I am making do while I weather my bouts of composition.”

The gales whip against the tent. Maedhros kneels beside him. His heated, celestial brightness precedes him, and then Maglor catches the insinuation of butchery lingering on him -– a raw, intimate smell. He cants forward and kisses Maedhros’ cheek, heedless of it.

Eyes on his forearm, Maedhros reads out, “'The lover as reliquary.'”

“They are only ideas I should like to recall later,” Maglor excuses himself, diffidently. 

“Your handwriting is wretched,” Maedhros observes.

“The writing is simply means to an end,” Maglor dismisses with an affronted raise of eyebrow. “The words mean to be sung, not read.”

“Dictate to me,” Maedhros says, taking Maglor’s yet-unmarked arm upon his knee and exposing the skin there.

Maglor favors him with a look, which Maedhros meets like a challenge. Slowly, he offers him the quill and lies back against their palliasse, arm outflung for Maedhros. 

He watches Maedhros watching him, then closes his eyes. The scent of blood, viscera close. Maedhros close. He licks his lips and pushes it from his mind.

Begin only a hum: a melancholy extempore, an invitation to express. 

The lyrics arrive halting and recitative, brief impressions –- _the torn seams of the earth_ and _the sea sipping down footprints_ — Maedhros steadies his work with his elbow, inscribing precise, angular tengwar upon skin. 

The quill tip is careful, light. It tickles. Maglor keeps his eyes studiously closed and bites back a fitful smile.

Draft an incantation, find how it rests on the tongue. Sing to spellbind.

 _The wavecaps bone white, sinking like teeth_ -– and -–

Maedhros trails the quill against his skin. He pauses only to smooth his tunic sleeve up further to get to more of him, dedicated to inscribing the words on him. 

This ink will make a mess when it smears, inevitably. He’ll look bruised with it, the sweetened plum-dark. Like he’s stained gentle. Only Maedhros will know why. Only Maedhros will see.

Sing, stumble over phrasing. Listen to the wind tearing garrulously at their tent. Comprehend the feel of Maedhros’ arm over his, and the quill tip teasing against skin. The sliding up, up –-

A smile flickers across Maglor’s face and adulterates the cadence of his lyrics.

Maedhros runs out of unmarked skin. His attention returns to Maglor’s face: unvarnished intensity Maglor doesn’t need to see to know. 

It makes him daring.

Maglor unseeingly lifts his tunic hem and undershirt, reciting still. He hears Maedhros snort his almost-laughter before the quill begins scratching across the insinuation of his ribcage. Maedhros straddles his thighs to keep him still and press in closer to his work.

_The voice an altar. The words an offering._

Pretend the sensation doesn’t leave him unmoored and shy and giddy. That the plane of his stomach doesn’t jump when Maedhros scratches the tip down across it, though Maedhros sees and feels his every move. He cannot hide from Maedhros. 

Would Maedhros believe he had ever been a self-possessed bard, once upon a time drowned in garlands and crowned with laurels for the beauty he could manifest, if he hadn’t been there to see it for himself –- if his older brother hadn’t been there with all the rest in tow, congratulating him and burying him under wreaths of rose and jasmine. And Maedhros had always embraced him tightly, tightly so that Maglor would always remember: tightly enough that the petals crushed and tore apart between them in a colorful carnage.

Their heady aroma had drifted upon him long after it was over.

How like a dream, the life before they learned to be monsters.

Sing a spell to captivate –- Maedhros’ work dips low, indelible. Light and quick: Maglor smiles again and bites his lip to castigate himself.

And when at last Maedhros’ attention on him has seared his mind empty and at last he is lost for words, he speaks to the glide of letters Maedhros shapes upon him: “How far down into the night we have wandered, that now I sing only for you to hear me.”

Maedhros’ hand stills. 

“That my words are offered to you alone.”

A querulous tremor rouses the world; the tentpoles creak with the earthquake and Maglor covers his head. Wet ink glances across his face. Maedhros shields him with his body while they wait out the rending of earth. 

Slow diminuendo to quietude again. Leagues away, land slides into the sea. 

“Shall aught be left to heal by war’s end?” Maglor whispers to the empty aftermath.

“Nothing will heal.” Maedhros moves over him, sits up. “There is no ending that heals this land.”

“What becomes of us, then,” Maglor suggests.

There is no ending that heals.

“We go on.”

A specter of softness cracks through Maedhros’ flinty countenance, freed with the shifting landscape. He leans in to brush at the ink marring Maglor’s face. He licks his thumb and wipes at the contour of Maglor’s cheekbone, the bridge of his nose.

Maglor closes his eyes for the moment Maedhros’ thumb grazes across his ink-smudged lip. He is caught and left unguarded upon the unhealed landscape, a vulnerable creature.

They go on.

“Oh,” Maglor manages, “this is a mess.”

Maedhros leans in and kisses him, tongue flicking against the mark on his lip.

Maglor tries, prudently, to smile away the moment.

He tries.

He manages, instead, only a stuttered sigh against Maedhros’ mouth, before the tip of his tongue slips against his brother’s to share the taste of bitter ink. 

Maedhros’ hand grabs at nape of his neck; mouth moving, then slick meeting of tongues again -- brief. 

Maglor follows after him, lips coaxing before he mimics Maedhros’ brevity and breaks away -– only to immediately acquiesce to another kiss from Maedhros. Deeper now, tongues pressing, lingering a heavy beat before Maglor is sure it’s ended. 

Then the next kiss. His eyes open. Then the next. His eyes shut.

He frames his brother’s face in his hands. Further. Maedhros’ teeth worry at his bottom lip. How far?

Reckless, letting Maedhros hike his tunic back up: palm flat and possessive on the ink-marked skin, higher to where he is blank and awaiting touch. And then touching him. 

Reckless how fluently his tongue pronounces want against Maedhros’, asking for heat, for knowing, for more -- .

Maglor flinches out of their hold on each other, pushing away with a rapid blinking: already recomposed, if not for the unsteadiness in his breathing, the fretful shift of his body against the bedding.

Maedhros leans away in kind, the warmth vanishing.

It’s just the hour. Just an escape from wounded corners. An irresponsible dodging of despair.

No need to ask what is next, or why. There is fire to build, water to draw, the blades ringing to be honed, and their thirst begging to be slaked.

The owl calls through the trees. The starlings have not landed; they cavort wildly, contort darkly. 

Maedhros touches at his hair, briefly as an accident, and returns outside where all goes forgotten but work.

Maglor lies back and presses his harp’s smooth wood against his chest to smother his racing heart.

8.

They hunt together, their tread hours-deep and dauntless on the trail of orcs.

Maedhros locks onto his prey. He is famished for their deaths. He flings himself into the killing, a vibrant and terrible inferno. Maglor vanquishes two beasts. Bow, then blade: artful but for the apathy in the thrust of steel.

They move to intercept the orcs’ progress toward the Men’s dwellings -- 

But there are too many orcs, frenetic and unpredictable, and they have already wreaked their havoc upon the Men before the sullen clouds began heaving their rain.

They approach a modest home. Maglor knows the home.

They halt short of entering the open doorway, where the elemental tang of blood mingles with petrichor. They are no strangers to collateral damage. And yet Maedhros, with his statuesque bearing, wordlessly barricades Maglor from looking into the darkened threshold.

Silently, Maglor turns away and wanders the clearing for sign of survivors, seeking snapped twigs or muddy footprints to track. His hands, with nothing to fix, smooth down his tousled hair into a swift braid, and he tugs his cloak and tunic’s collar back into symmetry -- as though he’d return to the life of the musician who knew no tragedy, who knew at worst the yearning between the strings, the pang of the final note hanging unmet in the air.

He would return, but he has lost his way.

He casts a long look around himself before brushing away a tear.

The cold glint of gold has caught Maedhros’ eye: he collects the bracelet shoved underneath hay and polishes away the dirt, recognizing it. 

He is recalling, Maglor knows, when Maglor began wearing it: they’d been living together in Himring, hadn’t they, and still speaking of happiness. It might have been a bracelet Caranthir convinced Maglor to pick out, too proud to utter the word “love” but so eager to show it -- or was this the piece Daeron of Doriath had sent Maglor after making his acquaintance at the Mereth Aderthad, sending also his compliments –-

Maedhros turns it over in his fingers. He looks at its circumference and, in his mind’s eye, fits it back onto Maglor’s wrist, fits Maglor back together. “Káno -- ."

“It isn’t mine,” Maglor says, voice clipped. He digs a small hole near the doorway and takes the bracelet, only to tuck it in under a tidy blanket of soil. 

And then it’s over.

They circle a return to cull the remaining orcs. Their paces quicken when they track the a solitary, disoriented orc near their camp. The creatures have ransacked their campsite, plain to Maglor when he finds spilled lentils along the overgrown path; they are starving and directionless, frenzied from wartime neglect. It is almost pitiable.

Maedhros stops him, a hand persuasive on his shoulder. “We can no longer abide our vulnerability here. We go North, following the coastline.” He scans the trees, doesn’t bother acknowledging the dismay on Maglor’s face. “The maelstrom of war will vanish our traces and give us time enough to lay plans.” 

“I would see us travel inland, that we may assess who remains of our forces and restock provisions,” Maglor counters, ardently. “We are otherwise a shambles.”

Maedhros begins walking again, indifferent to Maglor. Maglor steps before him to steal back his gaze. “The upheavals only gain upon this fraught shore. The springs are brackish with seawater. Our quarry have escaped to the interior, wiser than we: let us follow the pheasants and deer to safety.”

But Maedhros doesn’t admit to hunger, nor uncertainty.

“If you prize your comfort so, then I go North alone,” Maedhros says, staring down Maglor. “You wait in those besieged highlands for the next parade of orcs, and the next.”

“Neither of us goes alone,” Maglor argues.

“So be it. Onward.”

He curls his fingers against Maedhros’ arm on the dismal stride back to camp, fearful for one who has forgotten how to fear. “No haste, Nelyo.”

“We are making up for lost time,” Maehros returns with hard disinterest. Still walking.

“By tossing ourselves into the lacuna of a war not ours to wage? Into tumult?”

Maedhros would concede, wry, _It’s a steep fall_.

But the way it _beckons_ him forward --

“No,” Maglor decides, in the spirit of the king he’d once been. A tormented figure. “Let us contrive a sounder course of action in the morning light, without night’s uncertainty hounding us.”

Maedhros pivots and catches his wrist in an unforgiving grip before Maglor can recoil. His stares down Maglor like he would carry him away in his jaws. “Listen to me, Makalaurë: there are no survivors from that settlement of Men. No survivors further inland. No survivors anywhere within our purview.”

Maglor glowers at him before his gaze drops; Maedhros’ hand releases him to lift his chin, make him understand. “Stop deluding yourself. Dallying inshore, in this locale, will not bring the Men out of their hiding places. They are not awaiting your salvation.”

“No one awaits us anywhere at all,” Maglor bites out, stung for hearing the truth. “What is your hurry? We are overlooked, unwanted, unsought. We ought to bide our time within this neglect we’ve been gifted. So long as we remain safe, we are free as ever we shall be in this life. You are free. Is that not what you’ve desired? Freedom; freedom from -- “

“ _Tell me_ from what I want freedom,” Maedhros dares him.

Maglor drops his focus to the ground again. “I had a mind to ask you, for I cannot divine you,” he confesses. “I cannot say what of landing after such anguished flight so far from all we have loved, and through the maw of strife, repels you.”

Maedhros’ instep digs a staccato sound against the leaves; he is ready to abandon his brother’s introspection. “I think you know,” he returns coldly. “You play coy. But I think it haunts you, too, whenever you cannot escape into your pretty pretend.”

“I do not pretend anything. It is that I would insist on more from this life than -– I am not simply -– .” Maglor’s words falter on his lips; his voice catches. He frightens himself. He swallows. “I am more than merely a vessel for his will.”

He will not utter the word _father_ : they are too far afield in their own slaughters to call upon him. “You and I are more than the Oath and its evils.”

“Speak for yourself,” Maedhros says.

Maglor stares at him without a sound.

“Will you part with me here?” Maedhros is half-turned and leaving. 

Is solitude so easy an end for Maedhros to accept? 

They have a pact to keep.

They have journeyed so long and fallen for even longer, but together; and _together_ is the promise he cherishes, and the hope he sings of when all else disappears, unreachable --

“I cannot leave you,” Maglor says. “You know I cannot.”

“I am your captor, then?” He turns on Maglor, ready for Maglor to prove another sin to pile upon the rest.

“ _Maitimo_ ,” Maglor implores, “no.” 

“But?” presses his brother. Waiting to be hurt, and to inflict hurt in turn.

Apprehensive.

Maglor breathes in the heavy air. “But -- won’t you insist on keeping me as I insist on keeping you?”

Maedhros sidesteps the impediment Maglor makes; at last he returns to the disarray the orcs have made of their camp. He gathers together strewn tools and clothing tossed from the tent, looks to begin dismantling their erstwhile sanctuary.

Maglor discovers his satchel flung a few paces outside their tent. He slips into the tent in a sudden search -- swifts out again. 

He whisks behind the tent and halts, heart pounding, listening. 

He hears percussive raindrops against carved cherrywood a distance away under the open starlight, and answers its wan call to come and see.

He approaches his harp. He almost doesn’t recognize what his harp has become. 

Its elegant geometry has been trampled against the wet ground into disorder; curved shoulder and column crushed into malicious angles. 

The soundboard splinters up from the grass. 

The strings wilted, snapped underfoot. 

Mud oozes around the broken pins.

Maglor turns away. He takes a step; his legs refuse to carry him and he lists against a tree.

He realizes he’s been holding his breath and wringing his useless hands; he breathes in. A gasp. 

He is looks back slowly -- nearly cannot bear to look back, like to see the ending, broken and half-buried there, could at last end him. 

He looks back.

But nothing happens.

And that is the worst part.

+

Alone, Maglor keeps vigil over the pieces, afraid to touch. 

The trees groan against the wind; the wind picks up, growling to howling. The leaves shudder, the saplings, their very roots displaced.

The shuddering arrives for him next.

He begins to sing. He struggles through a strangled first breath that exhales a sob. Second breath steady. Joining the whine of the wind, he sings. It’s a plaintive, pretty lament. The notes lift effortlessly with the gales.

He raises his voice. The notes sweep to allure and enthrall, purposeful in their seduction.

Verse, chorus. The song weds the tearing squall and harmonizes, a beauty defying the failing Age. It sparkles, an ancient Light dancing upon the ocean, bright enough to cleave -–

He sings.

And then he draws himself up from the ground because the orcs have heard him, as he had commanded. Three have straggled a return to the site of their destruction, enchanted. It is imperative that they listen to him. 

They stagger toward him, raising their weapons with underwater languor.

He sings. They close in on him, beguiled and besotted –-

He unsheathes his dagger, misericorde. They are too lost in his song to respond with aught but acceptance. 

Misericordia, he meets them and cuts out their throats, a deep carving away of their lives, one after another.

They scarcely defend themselves, lost amongst the beauty and pain. They drop under its immensity. They writhe feebly, blood sputtering at Maglor’s feet.

And the song softens away into rest.

Quiet, Maglor shrugs his cloak off his shoulders. He evades the dying orcs and returns to the cherrywood flotsam.

Methodically, he disinters the harp’s broken neck, the chips of wood made incomprehensible, from the mud. His hands work until he counts all fifteen harpstrings recovered. He reunites them again in his gentle hold, watches their wilted rest. 

Doesn’t know why. Nowhere to put them, he bundles every piece into his cloak. And finally his hands are left with nothing more to do. And when there is nothing left to do, he cradles the wreckage and listens to its silence.

Nothing left.

But there is a hand at his arm then, wrenching him upright. Maedhros gathering him up like he is something worth salvaging in the desolation, saying something to him -- walking him back along the thorny path to the tent. 

He tries to see what Maedhros is thinking, but his brother is only a bright, handsome blur to his eyes: he realizes he’s been weeping. Long tracks of tears well and spill, salt water enough to feed the sea; they seep into the remains in his arms. He shudders in a breath, a hiccuping gasp, a shaking sigh, and lowers his head to hide. But he cannot hide from Maedhros.

Maedhros clutches him in a hard, grounding grip. Keeps him walking. Then pulls the heap from Maglor’s arms and places it carefully outside the tent’s canvas.

Maglor regards the mess. Maedhros is looking at him like –- 

_How do you look at me?_

“We are safe,” Maglor offers in a whisper, voice taken with the tears. “I sang them to sleep.”

“You did,” Maedhros says. He pulls Maglor into the tent out of the rain, makes him drink from his waterskin, sets him down to the palliasse, holds him when Maglor’s head falls against his shoulder, lets Maglor have his tears against him.

“Don’t leave me.”

“I’m right here.”

“Promise me.”

“I’m here.”

9.

It is over, but it doesn’t end. 

The land snarls and complicates under the rain’s pressure; mud and rocks, mud and breaking brush, flattened flowers. Land neglected by the Creator and the Creator’s creators, unloved now.

In the tenebrous black before dawn, he awakens from a sorrowing sleep against Maedhros’ shoulder. He washes away mud and tears. Maedhros unfurls the only untorn map left to them upon the palliasse, pores over plans northward with Maglor. 

Maglor listens, his fingers fidgeting against rabbit fur.

Together, they finish the watered wine in its nondescript skin, taking turns drinking dutifully, a sacrament to soldier through. Maedhros casts aside the empty skin. One less burden to shoulder. 

And then Maedhros looks to him.

“You see it a mercy to hurry forth our impossible errand,” Maglor murmurs. “A mercy to us.”

Maedhros inclines his head. 

“Perhaps it is,” Maglor whispers. He strokes at a frayed corner of the map, token of entropy. Touches at his unadorned collarbones, finding similarity. Maedhros watches his hand. The silence stretches. “Perhaps I have been a fool, forestalling our misery when already it burnishes every note of song, every needless test of our will. When already misery blights this landscape. This life.”

“No more indecision,” Maedhros decides for the both of them. “No more distractions. We go on as sworn.”

The quiet stretches long.

“Am I a distraction?” Maglor asks then.

Maedhros stares at him, eyes remote. “No.”

The heels of his hands pass over eyes tired from tears. How tactile sorrow goes; it clings to him like the damp of water in his hair. Like carnage to Maedhros –- to the both of them. 

“What am I?” he ventures. “When my fingers forget the bite of string into flesh, when I find no more ink to write of the good things I knew, when all the singing birds become bones, when spring fails to return and show us to a softer place, and the wanting for your love grows so heavy upon me that I fear to ask -- what am I then?"

“You are with me,” Maedhros says.

Filthied by the same pitch. Digging the same chasm, sealing this promise: _together_.

Maglor doesn’t seek to describe what they may be together. He wants to grieve _forsaken_ , he wants to confess _beloved_ , he wants to condemn _monstrous_ , he wants to say -- 

Maedhros takes his hand and kisses his fingers. Maglor leans over the map and places his hands on Maedhros’ knees. He kisses Maedhros, hopeless in searching for a word that doesn’t burn.

But to utter even a name sears him like a brand; he only sighs through half a syllable, _Mai_ , when Maedhros licks him open; he tastes salt –- salt of sea or tears -- before unraveling against him, settling in his lap like he’s been famished for Maedhros –- and it is unendurable, the heat of it. And the heat compels him to move: threading his fingers in Maedhros’ short hair and leaning his weight against him to urge _together_. He moves against Maedhros as if to insist, to stop --

But Maedhros isn’t going anywhere, locking him in and kissing like a demand. It takes a moment of unmelodic, artless give-and-take to slip into a rhythm and harmony, for Maglor to tilt his head, for Maedhros to kiss him deeply. 

Maglor’s legs hook around Maedhros’ waist, his lips moving with and against Maedhros’ in an unknown pronunciation, suasive and adulatory both: an articulation of desire through slide of tongue and press of lips freely given. Maedhros’ breathing goes uneven in this speechless interval, as if he hangs onto every insinuation of a word. He pulls himself free of Maglor’s slow undoing of him to kiss open-mouthed down the pillar of his neck, wrenching down tunic to taste the hollow of his throat, the jut of collarbone.

There is a moment where it could be the end. Maedhros’ thumb presses between Maglor’s reddened lips, between his teeth. _Open_. Their eyes meet. The intensity is almost enough for Maglor to slide off of Maedhros and dismiss the moment as just another misstep. Another transgression to fret over and then to obeisantly forget, to recall only when he is alone and misses Maedhros, wants his love, needs him, needs.

They look at each other. The pad of Maedhros’ thumb presses down on his tongue. Sweet, dirty. 

Maglor shifts on his brother’s lap and feels the swell of his arousal adamant against his rear. He moves with intention, drawing a sigh from Maedhros -- a thrill. A need, he needs. He moves again, again, flushed and dizzy. Maedhros’ eyes on him are dark and asking. He bites down on Maedhros’ thumb, sucking, rocking back and forth.

Then Maedhros’ mouth is on his again, even as he rises to his knees, imposing again, to extricate himself from Maglor’s grip on him.

Maedhros’ hand takes his hip, and the kiss breaks with a soft click as Maedhros turns him around. Fingers brushing hair aside, then fingers drawing up his thigh. Teeth gentle in the dip of neck and shoulder even as his erection shoves against the small of Maglor’s back. Maglor looks back to him and closes his eyes to a kiss when Maedhros leans forward to meet him.

“How you look at me,” Maedhros murmurs against the shell of his ear. Voice low, that huskiness dragging itself down Maglor’s spine.

“How do I look at you?” Maglor asks, the last vestige of poise in the melody of his voice.

Maedhros won’t indulge coyness anymore, nor pretend at grace; he ruts his desire against Maglor’s rear shamelessly and Maglor stutters out a breath, answers his own question:

“Like I want -- .” He falters upon the confession of _want_. Made vulnerable with it.

“Hm?” hummed close against his ear.

“-- I want you to insist on keeping me.” The words don’t spill out so much as tear, soft though they are. All he ever wanted; the only thing left to ask for.

He reaches unseeingly behind him, slipping a hand between their bodies to trail his fingers along the length of his brother’s arousal. A sharp exhale from Maedhros is cue enough to go on, to stroke him through the straining fabric adagio tempo, firm.

“Insist on me,” Maglor breathes.

Maedhros responds with a hand flat between his shoulder blades, pressing him down onto all fours.

His touch singes through linen and cotton until Maedhros shoves up his tunic; Maglor works at the ties on his trousers with a thoughtless imperative.

Strife-roughened fingers trace down the symmetry of vertebra. Maedhros’ open mouth follows, lavishing attention on him, his attention total.

Two fingers drift and press against Maglor’s entrance and his lashes flutter, head dropping. Then a tongue presses in and laps at him.

Maglor startles out an indelicate word before he can help himself, earning a pause and a sound approaching laughter from Maedhros for the rarity of it. Some still-cohesive corner of his mind wants to inhabit the moment, but he’s swifted away when Maedhros licks against him again. 

The iron grasp on his hip pulls him backward. Backward -– intensity, a hot tongue rolling slick and prodding, unabating against him.

His breathing goes shallow as he plucks fitfully at the bedding. His hips tentatively find and move with the rhythm Maedhros sets; Maedhros responds with movement fast and wet, licking at him until he shudders down to his elbows, burying his face into the fur.

That tongue seeks and pushes at his entrance, a small stretch, and he arches his back pliantly.

By the time Maedhros’ tongue finally breaches him, slow, slippery thrusts, he is jumbled and breathless. He backs himself against Maedhros’ mouth, asking for more. He flings his hand backward and clutches at Maedhros’ hair, _Don’t stop._

Maedhros’ tongue slinks deep into him and he gives a hushed cry. Underneath his clamoring heartbeat and his uneven breathing, he hears a rustle: Maedhros is stroking himself, getting off to it.

Careless, heady, he gathers the will to move away from Maedhros for the moment it takes to suck on two of his own fingers, reach and press one –- then the other -– slowly inside himself. His thighs shake. He feels Maedhros’ eyes on him, searing, and it coaxes him to move his fingers for Maedhros to see, to keep Maedhros pleasuring himself.

Maedhros’ tongue flicks around his fingers, licking around and through their slide. His fingers slip in further, and Maedhros’ breathing goes harsh. 

_Is this what you want?_ A languorous slide of his fingers in and out. _Is this what you want?_ Faster, stretching himself, harder. 

Arcing pleasure blurs his vision, threatening to overthrow him.

Maedhros can recognize the way he goes suddenly quiet, awash in the tide of sensation, and he moves away, grabbing for a satchel nearby. Maglor’s fingers slow inside himself, beckoning dreamily, taking their time.

And then Maedhros is taking his arm, bringing him upright -– both on their knees now, coupled and thrumming. Maedhros’ erection drags heavy, slicked with something from the satchel, across his bare skin. 

A moment where it could be the end. The way Maedhros just holds him, face in his tangled black curls. 

Maglor twists half-around in Maedhros’ embrace to see more of his brother, as though he needs to be reminded of his face before it ends -- the end just there, just on the precipice of vanishing –-

Creak of strained fabric, of clothing half-shucked off a shoulder, around knees. Maedhros’ mouth kisses a burning procession down his neck again, pausing to feel the vibration of Maglor’s voice when he speaks softly, fiercely: “Don’t let me go.” 

Maedhros releasing a sigh like he’s been waiting.

Maglor cants his hips back against Maedhros’ length, wanting to feel, to know.

Is it damnation to insist? To find their way here? Does any Creator hear anymore, does anyone see?

No one but Maedhros. No one else in the world. No world at all. Just.

“Please,” Maglor prays.

The rain outside will flood this fractured land out to sea, and the two of them with it. He is sure of it. He is sure of Maedhros’ light behind him. Making him think –

He stops thinking.

The owl calls. The starlings land. Burning. A cry -– his own. The rainfall’s discourse bleeds out into ringing silence for the moment he only feels: Maedhros around him, inside him; aching; breathing. 

A minute movement of hips back against Maedhros. Aching giving over breath by breath to aching for more.

A hand grasps his waist. An arm locks across his chest. They move, somnolent, until their skin presses flush together, smoldering – and he is utterly full with Maedhros. Maedhros muffles a curse against his shoulder.

Slow as a rite, an indulgence, Maedhros nudges his hips into him. Maglor’s eyes close and he gives himself to the drifting ebb and flow. He arches into the slow rocking, and it feels. It feels. They rise and fall together. 

He curves his arm back to grasp at Maedhros’ hair again, persuade him nearer so that his brutal heat is inescapable. 

Maedhros’ hips move languidly until Maglor coaxes him with a little wriggle and with a sound, another, quavers and breves, to rock into him faster. Just a little –- 

A little harder.

He moans, squirming again on Maedhros’ cock.

Maedhros murmurs something incomprehensible, upward inflection of _Káno_ in a question, against his hair, teeth at his ear. Maglor rushes in reply, blankly, fervently, “Yes, all of you, more, have me.”

A little more, and more.

Maedhros takes him at an angle that sends a current of pleasure uncoiling through his body. He stutters a note, off-key, gasping. Maedhros wants to hear it again, wants to fuck more sounds from him: he keeps going, right there, relentless.

It makes him go unsteady through a litany of broken moans -– but Maedhros’ grip on him is unassailable, keeping him against his chest. He pulls at Maedhros’ hair and grasps back at the thigh behind his to feel how Maedhros thrusts into him ceaselessly, like he would hollow him out.

Rend him to pieces.

Half-sinking in the swoop and tow of pleasure, he distantly hears Maedhros rasp, “Let me see you.” 

There is an asking beneath labored breathing and that burning invitation. Is it a bad idea? It seems a bad idea, sinful and brazen even after all this: after being claimed by his brother, after being fucked into a daze, it seems a bad idea. 

It’s a bad idea; the idea is a surge of pleasure Maglor immediately swims after. 

He pulls free of that strident embrace; Maedhros’ cock pulls out of him and he keens with the intrusive absence, needing to make it right: he turns on Maedhros and pushes upon him with a wordless urgency, pushing him down to sprawl supine on the palliasse. 

He slips on top of him, tangled in trousers until he kicks them off unceremoniously, dizzied and breathless.

He kneels astride Maedhros’ hips and pitches down to kiss him: the line of brow, his scarred nose, his neck, his maimed ear, his lips. His hair slips down around them, untidy and ignored.

He strokes his knuckles against Maedhros’ striking cheekbones. He meets Maedhros’ dark gaze, and Maedhros shivers like Maglor could vanquish him –- 

Perhaps it’s all monstrous to Maedhros: how flawless Maglor remains amid all wreckage they’ve wrought; how beautifully all his butchery arrays him; his lips reddened, stained with the bloodshed they’d spoken into being. Perhaps --

But Maedhros then props himself up on his elbows to get close, to kiss him as though to drink in the stains and make sure they’re his own, too. Against Maglor’s mouth, he murmurs, “Sit.”

He does.

Build of tension seeking release, Maglor fucking himself on Maedhros’ cock. Maedhros’ hips buck, a steady harmonizing, up into him.

“Oh,” Maglor begins, an interrupted serenade or a confession, the words forgotten –- expressing instead with his hips –- “Oh,” again, and the rest gets lost.

Broken parts, heaped onto each other. Maedhros’ familiar cuts and grazes are under his fingers, under crumpling linen, and Maglor draws his hands down, reading them like new, like he couldn’t stand to lose knowing this again and again. When he grinds his hips down in a devoted fervor, Maedhros knocks his head back against the palliasse, growling, short russet hair tousled across his eyes.

And then Maedhros finds the place that changes the pitch of Maglor’s sounds to something torn, frantic, and fucks into him there. He is unstrung, course by course, until his jaw goes slack and he’s riding Maedhros with a single-minded need. 

Close –- he strokes at himself, watching Maedhros until his eyelashes flutter shut and he shakes on Maedhros.

Maedhros sits up. Close. It didn’t seem possible to be so close. Arms encircle him and bid the final sin out of him: to throw his arms around Maedhros’ neck and kiss him as he pushes himself down on his cock, wanting to come, wanting to make Maedhros come. 

“I have you,” Maedhros murmurs into his mouth, heated, unbearable.

“Keep me,” Maglor gasps, and then Maedhros is fucking him until he’s crying out. 

And then Maglor is coming in his hold, a sob, a clawing at Maedhros' back as he's overtaken. But Maedhros catches him, and he keeps him. 

And Maedhros is there, when he tightens around him -- a ragged moan, a few more thrusts before he’s pulling down Maglor’s hips to keep their bodies flush against each other, and coming inside him.

Slipping away together.

It would be simple to end this way. 

Wait out the fearsome winter in this messy embrace, listening to the rain that turns to hail that turns to snow that turns to a fog that never lifts. 

Maybe they disappear into it, become nothing more than a memory from a place already long gone. No one to remember it. Maybe it would be simple to end so.

Maybe Maedhros still loves him. Maybe it’s enough. It feels like enough, when Maedhros pulls him down against the palliasse, panting through sensation and asking for Maglor there, beside him. 

They reach out for each other and hold through the moment, like there is nothing else in the world they would seek to possess.

10.

It is over, but it doesn’t end.

The rain’s patter on cherrywood keeps him awake. He touches at Maedhros’ hair, briefly as an accident. He almost doesn’t leave, but then he does: into the dark to find the lonely heap of his harp. He cradles the swaddled remains close, hiding them away from cold that stresses the strings, the wet that warps the wood.

He doesn’t look up to the glow in the night that guides him. He knows what it is. He knows what he is. He keeps his eyes upon the fragmented earth.

He walks to the chasm; its steep apathy beckons. Come and see. 

The birds begin singing away the nighttime over his head. They rustle the fiery, dying autumn leaves free from the trees. The leaves slip and fall to their melodies, spinning and dropping out of sight. Maglor hums something in reply, a song he used to play upon the strings. But it’s only him now. 

The leaves drift down around him one by one. 

One by one, he lets the pieces of the harp fall into the chasm, into its ancient, unknowable dark. 

There they fall through a place silent and liminal, where nothing breaks. A benevolent place, a happy ending.

The harpstrings vanish last, waving. Then Maglor’s hands are empty and it is over.

But the leaves keep falling, those beautiful perishing colors that caress his head and drift upon his shoulders on their way down.

He wonders why they were made at all, why they were born -–

Only to be thrown away. 

There, without a sound, falling –-


End file.
